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Day to Reflect After Bearing Storm’s Wrath

Audrey Shields, 79, center, and her family gathered in Coney Island, Brooklyn, for Thanksgiving, as they have for half a century.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

As with so many others living on the storm-battered coast, Audrey Shields did not know almost until the last minute whether Thanksgiving would be celebrated at her home this year, as it had nearly every fourth Thursday of November for a half-century.

Ms. Shields, who is 79 and uses a wheelchair, had not left her 14th-floor apartment in Coney Island, Brooklyn, since Hurricane Sandy washed ashore. But the previous days had offered small glimmers of hope. The electricity returned last week, though it failed intermittently. The gas returned on Tuesday, and the radiator clunked back to life on Wednesday, allowing her to cast off her layers of blankets and coats.

And even though the water stopped running again on Thursday, her apartment filled with family members willing to lug brimming buckets and gallon containers up all those flights of stairs. Sure enough, Ms. Shields, her children and their children managed once again to cook Thanksgiving dinner, preparing food until 2 a.m. the morning before. And then, before taking their seats to eat, they tightly gripped one another’s hands Thursday to pray in thanks for what they had.

“It was harder, but when you got your family and your life, you’ll make do,” Ms. Shields said, “And we did.”

The storm-tossed landscapes of New York and New Jersey were virtually unchanged from previous days, with entire waterfront communities cracked open to the elements. But after nearly a month of laboring at the basic task of survival, for the most affected residents, the arrival of the holiday provided a moment to pause, and again to take stock.

Some gathered around dinner tables, alongside family members or kindhearted strangers, to celebrate in steely defiance of life’s disruptions. Others massed in churches or high schools filled with more food and volunteers than anyone knew what to do with. And still others continued digging, cleaning, rebuilding and trying to stop the incessant invasion of mold, with the holiday serving as another painful reminder of how very far from a once-comfortable, distant normal life had become.

“How’re we going to celebrate?” Alex Tacoronte, 48, a retired police officer, said midday Thursday as he stood in his gutted house in New Dorp Beach, Staten Island. “The holidays don’t feel like the holidays.”

On a street nearby, Anthony Curro, 52, who has been relying on candles and flashlights, turned down invitations to dinners elsewhere because he wanted to stay in the neighborhood and feared that leaving could possibly encourage looters. The one thing that set this day apart was he had shaved for the first time in a week.

Photo

Akira Sherrod, 7, Marie Hanlan, center, and others ate a Thanksgiving meal at a recreation center in Long Beach, N.Y., where 200 turkeys were served by a local barbecue restaurant.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Yet others in the neighborhood were determined to bring cheer. Four women who said they were part of a hurricane-relief fund picked their way past half-ruined homes in New Dorp Beach, bearing food and envelopes filled with cash. A Red Cross truck wended its way through streets nearby.

“Turkey and apple pie!” a volunteer announced. “Wave to us, and we will stop!”

The truck trundled past a house where two teenagers wearing masks were hauling buckets filled with debris. They did not wave.

In Gerritsen Beach, a small seafront community in Brooklyn where many homes withstood damage in the storm, the annual Thanksgiving Ragamuffin Parade marched on. Firefighters dressed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse, the Cookie Monster and Clifford the Big Red Dog paraded to the tunes of the community’s marching band, the raucous peals of their Christmas carols a jarring contrast to the quiet blocks lined with totaled cars and vacant homes.

“Better days are coming! Better days are coming!” the bandleader, Lillybeth Hanson, cried out.

Sites that served free hot food became welcome, if fleeting, oases of luxury and warmth. The Wall Street outpost of Cipriani served 1,000 free Thanksgiving dinners on Wednesday to people bused in from neighborhoods hit hard in the Rockaways and Coney Island and on Staten Island. The food was served on white-cloth tables laden with flowers, as a jazz band played, and attendees were also given dinners to take home. Margarette Purvis, president and chief executive of the Food Bank for New York City, which bused in the attendees, said some were shocked to a standstill, asking timidly, “Are we in the right place?”

Donated Thanksgiving meals were also served Thursday on white-cloth tables, beneath brass chandeliers, to hundreds of hurricane victims at Fort Monmouth, a former military post in Monmouth County, N.J. At the buffet table, P. J. Harman, 67, who has had no electricity, gas or water since the storm, piled his plate high with sweet potatoes, green beans and chicken française. He walks with a cane, but needed two hands to carry his food to the table.

A few tables away, Joe Eskridge, 49, who works as a firefighter in Sea Bright and has been living with his family in a house rented through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the food made him feel moored for the first time in weeks. “When you’re displaced, you kind of don’t know what day it is sometimes,” he said. “But this is right, right where I belong.”

At New Dorp High School, volunteers lined up behind dozens of steaming foil trays prepared to serve Thanksgiving dinner to 600 people. Ronald Carrique, 56, showed up with his wife, daughter and son, taking a brief break from cleaning his house on Roma Avenue to enjoy the food, and not bothering to take off his jacket or headlamp.

“I haven’t had a salad in three weeks,” Mr. Carrique said, eyeing a heap of lettuce on his plate. “I’m saving it for the end. I want it to be the last thing I taste in my mouth when I leave.”

Volunteer efforts, which invariably peak at Thanksgiving and Christmas, formed their own tidal surge. In some places, food donations and offers of help seemed overmatched to need. In the East Village in Manhattan, Jessica Alfreds, a caterer, along with legions of volunteers, prepared hundreds of dinners to serve storm victims at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. But those wishing to help ended up far outnumbering people seeking meals. As the afternoon wore on, someone called the Bowery Mission, offering food, and two volunteers said they would carry dinners to homeless people in a park nearby.

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Steven Sumner of Staten Island ate leftovers on Thursday from a meal he and his wife had at a relief center. Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

In New Jersey, Jennifer Kaufman set up a Facebook page to match host families with strangers displaced by the storm, yet she had trouble finding people in need. About 600 people offered to host, but just over 40 families had been matched up. Still, those who took up the offer were awash in gratitude.

“It’s wonderful,” said Joanne Rothermel, 69, who said she had lost everything in the storm and was hosted by Courtney Wood, 31, who lives in Bradley Beach. “You can sit down and relax and talk and not just eat and run out the door.”

In some still-recovering households, the most dogged of the storm victims were ensuring that Thanksgiving was unfolding as it always had.

Lisa Bungay, whose house on Staten Island was showing signs of mold and still did not have hot water or heat, had thought about going to a free dinner at the Excelsior Grand ballroom on Hylan Boulevard. Her daughter wanted to order Chinese, but her husband, John, would have none of it. As long as they had gas to cook with — and they did, as of Saturday — he was determined to prepare dinner for the family.

And so he got up at 7 a.m., made sure the dining table was clean and headed to the kitchen. “Why should this year be any different?” he asked, gesturing to a glistening turkey. Ms. Bungay smiled. “So what if we don’t have hot water?” she said. “My husband’s doing the dishes.”

Yet for some, even the mention of Thanksgiving was enough to provoke tears. In Long Beach, N.Y., Paulette Williams spooned butternut squash soup with her 9-year-old daughter in a large tent that had been stretched over a basketball court, where 200 turkeys were to be carved up and served by a local barbecue restaurant. Ms. Williams said she felt ashamed that she was unable to serve her daughter her Thanksgiving favorites: rice and peas, glazed ham and other Jamaican specialties. “I have failed as a parent,” she said, tears streaming down her face.

As the day drew to a close, it was back to a cold, dark reality for many.

After getting his fill at Fort Monmouth, Mr. Harman journeyed by free shuttle bus back to his home in Sea Bright, hobbling past sand dunes washed inland and hulking piles of ruined dishwashers, washing machines and refrigerators.

He climbed his way to his cold and cluttered second-floor apartment. Canned goods awaited him, piled high on the dining-room table — chicken potpie, beef stew and clam chowder — his usual dinners these days, and now always eaten cold.

Mr. Harman would spend the night just the way he had every night since the storm, huddled beneath two coats and heavy blankets, listening to his crackling battery-powered radio in the dark. “That’s a really nice job they did back there,” he said, happily remembering the warm meal. “I really appreciate that.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 23, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Day to Reflect After Bearing Storm’s Wrath. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe